


Draconia

by perceived_nobility



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Mentions of alcoholism, a fair amount of swearing, and a cat who swears more than any person but we can't understand her, people got therapy!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 10:15:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15362292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: "So I was driving. One ex wife and one ex husband later, stopping at the same fucking gas stations you and I stopped at."





	Draconia

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a twitter thread and the two co-conspirators know who they are

The town of Alsea doesn’t even really count as a town. It’s a collection of houses halfway between I-5 and the Pacific, smack in the middle of logged forest, and just over the border from less-logged National Forest. It’s three streets and one of everything else: post office, elementary school, public library, cafe, grocery store old and quaint enough to be called a “mercantile.” Mark stops because he’s been driving long enough that his legs are starting to cramp and he has to pee, and he might as well eat somewhere that isn’t a gas station. Pushing 50, Twinkies and Slim Jims don’t go down like they used to. 

He’s been driving a lot, recently. Joan would call it a midlife crisis if she wasn’t calling it a good way to reclaim traumatic aspects of his past. For what it’s worth, Mark calls it taking the road trip he’s been wanting to take for twenty-odd years and never got to. Not until Armando’s check landed for Mark’s half of their duplex and they’d walked out of their final mediation session. They hadn’t even shaken hands. Mark gets it. He wouldn’t particularly want to shake his own hand after what he put Armando through. 

So he’d climbed into his car and, a day later, started to drive. He’d had some half-nursed notion of flinging his wedding ring into the Pacific at the end of all this, but that idea soured pretty quickly. He wasn’t twenty anymore. Wasn’t even thirty, in his first divorce, which was dramatic and heart-rending enough that such a spectacle would’ve felt appropriate. But he’d kept that wedding ring, and now he kept Armando’s next to it, in a closed jewelry box tossed somewhere in the baggage in the back of his car.

ƒA

Thankfully, his self-pity had fizzled out with the rest of his dramatics, somewhere back east. Since then it’s been peaceful. Quiet. Sometimes he’ll pull in somewhere and feel someone’s ability fizzing away in his brain. He’s woken up in the dreams of people two rooms down in a couple different motels, but that was because they dragged him in, not because he went himself. He knows how to handle himself, now. He hadn’t even stopped long enough to say hello to any of them. Things are better for the kids now than they were for him. They don’t have to be as afraid as he was, don’t feel as alone. He wouldn’t be the first, or even the tenth Atypical many of them met: he’d just be a weird single older guy knocking on their door at midnight.

He parks on the shoulder of the road outside the one cafe in town and proceeds to make his way through a few cups of coffee and a prodigious stack of pancakes. He pays, leaves, and instead of getting back in his car, sets off up the side of the highway back towards town proper to stretch his legs. The summer is hot and a little humid, clouds overhead threatening rain the way they always seem to this far north. 

On a whim, he takes off down a side street, peeking at the tiny homes on cinderblocks dumped down onto rolling lawn. Hardly a fence in sight. Down the street is a small power plant, buzzing away. Someone is bent over in a front yard, swearing under his breath as he tugs futilely at the base of a large, half dead berry plant. Something about the timber of his voice tugs at the back of Mark’s brain and he finds himself slowing, heart racing, simultaneously hoping the guy stands up and that he gets his head permanently stuck in the berry bush.

He feels ridiculous. It’s been--god, decades. He shouldn’t be nervous. Over the years, he’s run into countless people who sounded, or who smelled, or who at a distance or behind a parked car looked at half a glance like him. And it never was. Mark wishes he could say he’d stopped looking, but the truth of it is that he’d started looking for different reasons.

Now, a fluffy, longhaired cat with a face that looks like it ran into a door slithers out from the depths of the bush, stopping about a foot away from Mark to yell at him. He chuckles, sinking down into a crouch, wincing as his knees pop. “Hey fella,” he says, offering a hand to sniff. The cat stares at him, unimpressed, before bypassing his hand completely and ramming its face into his shin.

He’s halfway to taking the compliment when he feels spiky claws sink into the meat of his thigh, and the next thing he knows he’s got ten pounds of fur and muscle heaving its way onto his shoulders using bespoke handholds carved directly out of his flesh. “Jesus--” He doesn’t want to shake her off because that will only hurt worse, but Christ. 

There’s a muffled curse from the direction of the berry bush, and then a voice. “Draconia! Sorry--” The cat gets plucked unceremoniously from his shoulders, leaving tracks halfway down his back as she scrabbles to stay on. “She does that.”

Mark unfolds himself at the same time the guy looks down at him, and for a long moment after that, neither of them moves at all.

Damien--it is Damien, it has to be Damien--looks good. Or, he looks--Mark mentally smacks himself. Part of his deal after Armando was to be honest with himself, no matter what. Damien looks good.

He’s got salt-and-pepper hair now, and a short cropped beard. Mark had always privately thought he’d go for a goatee if he ever grew it out, and maybe he had, and then realized how ridiculous he looked. He looks less pallid than he used to and he’s filled out. When he was young, Damien had clearly cared about his appearance in a way that made it seem like he was intentionally trying to copy any given bad guy from a straight-to-DVD action movie, but without the follow-through to get well and truly jacked. Now, he’s soft around the middle and under the chin. He has wrinkles. The world’s run his hands over him, the same way it has to Mark--to everyone he knows. 

“You named your cat Draconia?” He’s smiling as he says it, because it is, like many things about Damien, completely ridiculous and entirely predictable. Damien frowns, holding Draconia to his shoulder even as she hisses.

“What do you want, Mark.”

Mark blinks. “Maybe a band-aid? She did a number on me before--and when--you pulled her off.” He stands back up, swinging his arms a bit to feel out the damage. His back stings where he’s sweating into the cuts.

Damien rolls his eyes, pitching Draconia in the general direction of the house. He crosses his arms, widens his stance. “What. Do. You. Want.”

“Nothing.” Mark holds up his hands. “I swear. I had no idea you were here. I’m--” He jerks a thumb in the direction of his car, around the corner and up the highway. “--Just passing through.”

“So nobody told you I was here.”

“No! Listen, man, I’ll show you my car, it’s got all my shit in it. I’ll even get in it and leave right now, in front of you.” He puts his hands down, takes a minute to sincerely resent the promise he made to his latest therapist before he left town, to follow his gut, chase his feelings. “But I’d really appreciate a band-aid.”

Damien narrows his eyes, but leads him up the stairs to a porch choked with overflowing potted flowers, through the front door and down a long hallway. Mark catches a glimpse of a dining table with four chairs, a well-loved couch with afghans, of all things, piled on the back. Draconia rockets by them, moving so fast both Mark and Damien almost trip over her.

“Fucking cat,” Damien grouses, leaning in a doorway to flick on a light. He gestures to the bathroom and steps back, blocking the hallway leading deeper into the house.

“She’s something all right,” Mark says, sidling into the bathroom.

“She’s an asshole. Band-aids and neosporin are in the top drawer.” Damien slams the door behind him.

Mark makes quick work of patching up what he can see and blindly smearing neosporin on what he can’t. After years of trying to align himself to be wherever Damien was’t, despite engineering his life so he never knew even vaguely where Damien was, it’s strange to the point of unreality to be sitting in his bathroom. He has a plain, slate gray shower curtain, and a punk rubber duckie with a ripped plastic vest and a purple mohawk on the back of the toilet.

When he’s done, and he’s washed all the leftover neosporin gunk off his hands, Mark finds Damien in the dining room with a plate of crackers and two glasses in front of him. “Do you, uh, want something? To drink. Or eat.”

“Yeah,” Mark says as he slides into the seat across from Damien, facing a kitchen that looks like it hasn’t been remodeled in about 20 years, but has definitely been kept up in the meantime. 

“Uh,” Damien is staring at him, eyes flicking to every twitch of his hips as he gets comfortable in the wooden chair. “I have, uh, bourbon, whiskey--”

“Water’s fine.” Mark lifts a shoulder apologetically. “I don’t drink anymore.”

This seems shocking enough to shake Damien out of it. “No shit.” He grabs Mark’s glass and goes to fill it from the sink. “How long?”

“Bout five years.” Damien doesn’t need to know the number of days. 

“Huh. Mazel tov. Or, not, I guess.” He plunks down an overfull glass of water, sloshing some on the gingham tablecloth. “Bet that made little Sammy happy.”

Mark raises his eyebrows and takes a careful sip of water. “She--ah. Isn’t in the picture anymore.”

Damien’s eyebrows make a break for his hairline. “I always thought you two were--” he makes a lewd gesture that seems to imply either banging like rabbits or fused at the hip or both. Mark chuckles, genuinely amused that he and Sam had looked like that to anyone.

“We were two disasters sharing orbits for a while. It never should have lasted as long as it did.”

“Who broke it off?” 

Mark glares, offronted at the gall of Damien talking to him like they’re friends who fell out of touch for a while, but really, that’s what Damien was always like. Assuming he could create intimacy by pretending it already existed. And a nosy fucker to boot.

“She did.” 

“Mm.” Damien plucks a cracker from the plate and crunches on it. “I’m not surprised. She was paranoid, but smart. Cracker?” He pushes the plate toward Mark, who takes one to be polite.

“So, what,” Damien continues, leaning back so the front two legs of his chair are off the ground. “Sammy made a smart choice and then, what, you realized you fucked up and went through a Hallmark-worthy personal transformation that ended up with you driving through the ass end of nowhere, Oregon, right into the lap of someone you never wanted to see again?”

“Not exactly.” Mark nibbles on the cracker for something to do, shakes butter and salt off his fingers. “I wouldn’t say I’m in your lap.”

“You’re in my house.” Damien lets his chair slam down into the carpet with a muffled thunk. “That’s a lot closer than a lot of people get.”

“Still in the business of being an insufferable loner?”

Damien grins crookedly. “Not exactly.” He drums his hands on the table. “I work. Down at the library.”

“You’re a librarian.” Mark can’t quite keep himself from laughing. “Damien--” he gestures to fill the space where he’d drop a last name if he knew one “--reading to children? I can’t picture it.”

“Fuck you, being a librarian isn’t just about Saturday morning storytime. And they like me anyway.” He drops his voice, tucking in his chin and stroking an invisible moustache much longer than the one he’s wearing. “I do a fantastic evil sorcerer voice.”

“Fuck me,” Mark agrees, sounding awed even to his own ears. The words hang between them in a silence he didn’t think to intend or expect. He reaches out for another cracker, thinks he sees Damien leaning in, and then something fluffy and sharp springs up between them. Draconia, who tries to clamp her jaws around Mark’s outstretched fingers before he yanks his hand away and bops her sharply on the nose. She stares at him, affronted, before nudging up against his hand with her skull, asking for pets.

“Sorry,” he says, to Damien’s shocked face. “Is she not allowed on the table?” His hand strays too far from where Draconia wants it, but he nimbly evades her and returns to scratching the one square inch she has deigned to let him touch.

“No, it’s fine. She just. Really likes you.”

“She reminds me of you,” Mark says honestly, as Draconia starts up a purr that sounds like an old diesel engine. “Demanding little fucker. Everything on her terms.”

This time, Damien’s mouth laughs but his face doesn’t. Mark lets him stew, focusing on keeping his water glass out of range of Draconia’s sweeping tail.

“Why are you here, Mark?” Damien waves off whatever he thinks Mark is about to say. “Why are you still here? You were pretty clear you never wanted to see me again, ever. I’ve--accepted that.” He reaches out to scratch Draconia’s other cheek, and she lashes out at him with a paw, but he just smiles at her and waggles his hand where her claw has halfway caught on a callus. “And now--I never thought this would happen.”

“I didn’t either.” Their hands are so close, only twisting pieces of cat between them. Mark’s been on the road so long he’s forgotten what being close to another human feels like. No, that’s not it. It’s just how he and Damien have always been, sparking off each other, static electricity stuck in motel rooms and waiting rooms and just waiting. 

“Your ability never came back?”

Damien shakes his head. “Nope. After a decade or so I quit expecting it to.” He narrows his eyes. “You knew that already.”

“Yeah.” No point denying it. 

“Are you only here because me being neutered makes me safe?”

“Damien, that ability was the worst thing that could have ever happened to you. It was one of the worst things that happened to me, aside from the AM. Sometimes there’s something about yourself that you’re so unequipped to handle that you have to not have it at all.”

“Like alcohol?”

Mark grimaces. “Yeah, sure. Like me and alcohol.” He never would have made the analogy himself, but it seems to make some sort of sense to Damien. Maybe there’s a 12-step program out there for Atypicals who have used their powers to hurt people.

“You never answered my question.”

Mark carefully extricates his hand from Draconia, unwilling to let himself get distracted and end up mauled for his trouble. “After my second divorce--”

“You heartbreaker!”

“Shut up. After my second divorce, over a year ago now, I started driving. It’s been nice. Sam and I always said we would go on a great big road trip together, after she got me out of the AM, but that never happened. Instead, the closest I got was with you.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

Mark just blinks for a second.

“I’m sorry.” Damien meets his eyes this time. The words don’t even sound dragged out of him, or rehearsed, or like the apology a kid gives another kid in front of a teacher. 

“Thanks.” He chuckles, rueful. “I think I stopped needing to hear that from you about a decade ago, but better late than never, I guess.”

“So you were driving.” The growl is back in Damien’s voice and it’s familiar enough to startle another laugh out of Mark.

“So I was driving. One ex wife and one ex husband later, stopping at the same fucking gas stations you and I stopped at. Finding the motels was harder, especially from the beginning, when I was passed out most of the time, and to be honest it wasn’t like I left Ann Arbor with the intention of retracing that particular set of steps. But I made this promise when I left that I would stop lying to myself, which sounds like bullshit but it’s fucking hard, okay, and I owe it to Armando at least to try to be less of a shitbag.”

“Armando: the ex boy?”

“Ex husband,” Mark corrects. “There’s more than one ex boy.”

“Heartbreaker,” Damien mouths, gesturing for Mark to keep talking. Mark braves Draconia enough to snag a cracker and throw it at Damien’s face. He dodges, the cracker sailing behind him to crack somewhere on the linoleum kitchen floor.

“So if I was literally revisiting our past, must be for a reason, right?” This is the hard part. The rest of this--it’s like riding a bike, if the bike in this case is an asshole with next to no people skills and the riding is much less literal than Mark has perhaps imagined. But not talking about it has always been such a big part of their--themness--that he’s worried it might be structural. But then again, he’s lived twenty years without seeing Damien at all, so he already knows essentially what life will be like if he pulls the rhetorical keystone out of their archway. Perhaps more terrifying is if it’s not a keystone at all but training wheels, and the rhetorical bicycle and its rhetorical riders go flying down the road, banking hard on all the corners, into some unseen future that’s full of rhetorical semis, for all he knows.

He’s been married and divorced twice. He knows these nerves, or at least an echo of them.

“I told myself for years--and I mean years, Damien. Half a lifetime of years. That you did something to me. Something with the way your ability resonated with my ability made some sort of echo chamber where you installed this wanting to like you that never went away. Or, if not that, then regular old Stockholm syndrome. Or like the thing I had with Sam, where we were both there just because we saved each other from something awful, except more fucked up, because you were more fucked up about how you treated me when you rescued me.

“But it never went away, and it never went away, and I went to therapy, and I went to more therapy, and I worked through the fucked up shit you did to me and it was still there. Hell, I married a guy who did Shakespeare on weekends because he could talk like you sometimes. I mean--there were other reasons I married him, but that’s why he divorced me, more or less.”

His hands are trembling in his lap but Damien’s got this look on his face like Mark has never seen before. 

“You know how I called Sam paranoid, about twenty minutes ago?”

It’s such a non sequitur that Mark actually starts. “Yes?”

“You remember back when she called me to get shit on you? After you banished me?”

“Yeah?”

“She knew then. She knew the whole fucking time. I asked her why she was calling me, or something like that. Why she came to me for advice, or something. You know what she said? ‘We’re in love with the same man, Damien.’ And she was right.” He looks past Mark, out the window, squinting a little into the light. “She was so worried you would leave her for me. She was too good at reading people, skipped right over that big thick surface layer of you that wanted nothing to do with me, right to the part that--

“For a long time I thought it was me, too. You--were actually the, well, a reason I was such an asswipe about my powers going away. Because you still cared! About me! And I wanted that so badly, and you have to understand, for forever, me wanting something made it happen. Other people didn’t have desires. Or personalities. Or--personhood. They were what I wanted them to be. So if you cared about me, my power must have still been there, somewhere, where I couldn’t control it. And that made me so angry.”

Between them, Draconia yowls, annoyed at being ignored. Damien pays her enough attention to pitch her unceremoniously off the table. He scoots in until Mark feels their knees bump. “But Joan was right: my ability was good and gone. Donezo. Forever. So that?” He knocks a knee into Mark’s, that crooked smile back on his face. “That was all you, buddy.”

“Guess it was.” Mark hooks his feet around one of Damien’s ankles. He’s in work boots, heavy with dried mud that flakes off against Mark’s sneakers. “So Sam knew you were in love with me, huh?”

“Told you she was smart.”

“I married her, man, I already knew. But--you were in love with me?”

Damien ducks his head. “I was twenty whatever and a shut-in with an ego bigger than the state. I would have called anything love.”

“What would you call it now?”

“Something I haven’t gotten over.” He licks his lips. “Mark--you’re sitting in a guy’s kitchen, playing a fucking amateur’s game of footie. Gonna give a guy some ideas, acting like that.”

Mark raises his eyebrows, feeling the road dropping away under the wheels. “What kind of ideas?”

“How about this.” Damien pulls his foot away and offers his hand instead. “How about you tell me what you want.”

“Yeah.” Mark pushes himself to his feet and walks around the table until he can grab Damien’s hand and pull him up. “Okay. I can do that.” Damien’s beard is soft when he runs a hand through it, coming to rest on the back of his neck. There’s a curve right in front of them, a blind 180 degree turn and they’re flying towards it, no hands on the brakes, pedals spinning too fast to keep up with. 

“I want you to kiss me.”

Because he’s an asshole, Damien pecks him on the forehead. Mark doesn’t think he’s laughed this much in years.

“Fine, you want to play that way?” He points to his cheek. “I want you to kiss me here.” Damien’s beard tickles his bare cheek, making his toes curl. He points to his nose. “Here.” His lips. “Here.”

Damien looks at him for a long moment this time, hands coming up to frame his face. He kisses Mark like he’s talking, no, like he’s asking, over and over and over. When he pulls away, Mark takes a second to gather himself, head reeling and breath coming fast.

“Here,” he rasps, pointing to his neck, and Damien takes his time with that one, working all the way from the hinge of Mark’s jaw down to the collar of his T-shirt. It sends shivers ricocheting down his spine, shoves his heart hard into his ribs. Damien noses his collar down and sucks a kiss at the tender hollow above his clavicle, then draws back. His fingers are twitching where they’ve settled on Mark’s waist, making little beckoning motions over the fabric of his shirt.

Smirking, Mark leans back, letting Damien take a little of his weight. “I want you to kiss me here,” he says, running a finger down his torso and over Damien’s hand on his hip to point, finally at his ass. “But not on the first date.”

Damien groans, burying his face in Mark’s neck. “Fucker.” He mouths at the skin there, worrying it lightly with his teeth. Mark sucks in a breath. “Where are you staying?”

“Don’t know yet.” He runs his hands through Damien’s hair, shorter than it used to be but long enough on top to have kept some of its curl. “Think the last motel I saw was in Philomath.”

“There’s a bed and breakfast up the road.” Damien trails kisses over his cheekbones. “But the lady who runs it volunteers at the library and I’d never hear the end of it.” 

Mark angles his head, chasing Damien’s mouth, catches him. When he lets him go, Damien continues: “Tell you what. Head west, out to Waldport. It’s a whole town, got Mexican food and everything. And a beach. I’ll come by tomorrow, get us tacos and we’ll walk on the waterfront.”

“I’d like that,” Mark says honestly. Damien smiles at him, easy and crooked and slow.

“I’d like that, too.”

Draconia walks all over their feet, complaining loudly. Mark stoops down to pick her up. Damien has his mouth open like he’s going to say something, but just leans in and pecks Draconia on the forehead and then kisses Mark full on the lips. Mark gets cat hair caught in his teeth and Draconia’s protestations are muffled in the fabric of Damien’s shirt.


End file.
